What’s the relationship between free exercise rights and anti-discrimination laws?
About this video
The speaker explains that the hardest free exercise cases involve generally applicable laws that someone says they cannot follow because of their religion. Perhaps the hardest of all are non-discrimination laws, such as public accommodation laws that stop businesses from discriminating on bases like sexual orientation, marital status, race or religion. In recent Supreme Court cases, business owners have claimed RFRA, free speech or free exercise rights to avoid complying with such laws.
You'll be able to
- explain why cases about generally applicable laws are the hard free exercise cases.
- describe what a public accommodation law does.
- explain the conflict between religious liberty claims and non-discrimination laws.
Key words
- Generally applicable law
- A law that applies to everyone and isn't aimed at a religion.
- Non-discrimination law
- A law that forbids treating people worse because of traits like race, religion or sexual orientation.
- Public accommodation
- A business or service open to the general public, such as a restaurant or bakery.
- RFRA
- The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law giving extra protection to religious exercise.
Transcript
[MUSIC] This is one of the really important questions that the Court is wrestling with because when you start thinking about cases that don't involve laws that are specifically targeted at stamping out religious practices, but you think about generally applicable laws. Then somebody says, "Wait, no, I don't want to comply with that generally applicable law because of my religion." Those are the hard cases.
Maybe the hardest cases are when the general law that somebody is trying to say they don't have to comply with is a non-discrimination law. You can think about the way that these two cases have come up to the Supreme Court more recently is cases in which there's a state law that is a non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or could be marital status. There are lots of these laws out there, sometimes referred to as public accommodation laws.
That if you are offering some public accommodation, whether it's a restaurant or a bakery or any other generally open business, you can't discriminate on a whole bunch of listed bases, which could include interestingly enough religion, but also could include things like sexual orientation or race. These cases come up in front of the Supreme Court where somebody's asserting either a RFRA or a free speech or a free exercise claim to essentially not comply with one of those non-discrimination prints [MUSIC].
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